"We could steal a boat in Vassashinay, and make for the southern current." I was speaking in a low voice, with one eye on the top of the companionway.
Shree tossed a fingerstick with a practised flick of the wrist. We had rigged up an awning on the afterdeck, because the sun in these southern climes was too strong to be borne for long, and the air below deck was even worse. I felt a little guilty about ordering Chasco to stay below, but I needed him there. The stick fell to Shree's profit, so he picked up another to continue his turn.
"It may be harder to get away than you think." He paused, then asked quietly, "Is there any chance you can use the Lady?"
I snorted. "I wouldn't depend on her. She works her own will these days, or hadn't you noticed? No, I think we'll leave the Lady out of our plans, and hope to heaven that she stays out."
"Then I don't think it's going to be easy. If the Frath does know about the Lady, he's going to sew you up as tightly as the Primate did to keep you from getting away. You'll be guarded all the time—I doubt if you'll be allowed to stir off the ship all the time we're in Vassashinay."
"I'm working on that, Shree." I surveyed the sticks gloomily. Shree had won back all that he owed me, and now I was sliding into his debt. He threw again, and this time lost the turn.
"My throw." I tossed a stick, cursed mildly when it fell on the dark side. "Listen. All I've got to do is convince the Frath that I have no intention of getting away."
"How are you going to do that?"
I paused with the next stick in my hand. "I'm going to snap up the bait he's offered me."
"The bait?"
I tossed the stick, disastrously. "Damn it. Your throw. Keep playing in case we're being watched. I mean Rinn."
Shree tossed the stick into a brilliant placement on the pile and looked at me with the beginnings of irritation. "What about Rinn?"
"She's the bait. She's obviously been told to captivate me—so I'll tupping well be captivated. From now on, I'll be paying her more attention. Flattering her, mooning after her. I've been far too honest so far. They're going to think I don't care about her."
"You don't."
I snorted. "That doesn't matter. She doesn't care about me, either. But all I've got to do is convince the Frath that I'm wet clay in her hands. It's what he desperately wants to believe, so it should be easy."
Shree passed his hand over his eyes. "Easy, eh? It might be easier if you jumped overboard and swam. She's trouble, Tig."
"Oh, I'm counting on that. And I'm counting on you as well."
"What for?"
"Keep playing, and I'll tell you." As we threw the sticks, I laid out for Shree the workings of the Frath's mind as I understood them, the illusion he laboured under regarding the Lady's biddability, the advantages to be gained by being Rinn's abject slave. And I told him what he had to say. By the end, he was grinning.
"I like it, Tig. You don't have to do much but play the fool, and you're good at that. What are you waiting for?"
"Chasco."
"Where is he?"
"Watching to see when one of Rinn's lovers joins her."
But Chasco was, in fact, striding up the companionway at that very moment. He stepped quietly on to the deck and beckoned to me. "It's time, Lord Tigrallef. Somebody just went in."
"Good." I started to gather up the fingersticks to shove them into their box. That's when the first wave of stage-fright hit. A few sticks fell out of my hand and clattered on to the deck. I said, "Perhaps I should give them some time to get started first."
Shree and Chasco looked at each other with complete understanding. "Come on, Tig," said Shree, "this is your own idea."
"I think I need to perfect it a bit first."
"It's fine as it is. What's wrong? You're not afraid of her, are you?"
"Not since I cut her nails."
Shree leered at me. "Well, then, are you worried you'll really fall in love with her?"
"Not a chance," I said grimly. That was true, and would have been true even if my heart had not been rotting on the seabed along with Calla's beloved bones. Likewise, I reckoned that Rinn's affections, if she had any, were more than safe from me. The sudden revulsion I felt was partly a matter of honesty—it was one thing to do my marital duty, it was another thing to pretend to worship the little harlot. And all the time, the Lady would be observing the comedy through my own eyes, which was downright embarrassing. As I thought of the Lady, I felt a ripple of her amusement spreading through my head.
Do you need any help, Scion?
"No. Don't bother."
"What?" said Shree.
"Nothing." I picked up a fingerstick that he'd missed, and handed it to him. Of course, he was right. It was a good strategy. The sooner I got started, the better. "All right, let's go."
I preceded the two of them down the stairs, resisting an impulse, now that the moment for action was approaching, to make a break for the foredeck. A couple of Fraths Minor passed us in the corridor, but the salon was empty when we reached it, possibly emptied by the sounds of passion being generated on the other side of Rinn's door. I stopped at the threshold.
"I don't know how to start."
Just then, we heard the footsteps of several men approaching the salon; the Frath's deep distinctive voice rumbled, at least two other men laughed with him.
Shree snapped, "Hurry, Tig. This is ideal. You can throw the bastard out in front of the Frath Major himself."
"But how do I begin—?"
"Go! You'll think of something."
"Is that supposed to be helpful?" I turned sourly back to the door and took a deep breath. At that moment, seconds before the Frath Major entered the salon, inspiration burst like a flame-bolt in my head. Acting on this inspiration, I flung open the door and slammed it shut behind me.
"Wife!" My very best bellow.
Abrupt cessation of noises from the pallet; the appearance of two pairs of startled eyes amid an improbable tangle of body parts. I strode to the pallet, chose one of the hairy legs, grabbed a handful of flesh, and pulled. Rinn's lover squawked and tumbled on to the floor. It was Zimin, the downy-faced Han-Frath who commanded the guardtroops on board the Tasiil, not Rinn's usual type at all; I was surprised, and a little shocked, that she'd sleep with any rank lower than a Frath Minor.
"Out!" I said, using a special low and dangerous voice that I'd learned from listening to the Primate. Zimin hastily started to gather up his clothes, and I forgot my role for a moment and actually bent over to help before I caught myself.
"Out."
He took another look at me, abandoned the rest of his clothing and went—with all possible haste, naked as a newborn, dropping bits and pieces of gear all the way to the door. I smiled to myself. This was not hard at all. Then I turned to face Rinn.
She was going to be more difficult.
Imagine a kitten the size of a rippercat, with teeth and claws in proportion; a rippercat, moreover, whose most recent kill has been rudely dragged from between its paws. I very nearly turned and followed Zimin out the door.
"How dare you?" she breathed. I gulped, but remembering my lines just in time, advanced a pace towards the pallet and struck a pose of passionate suffering.
"My life is not worth living if you continue travelling this road," I intoned fervently, by memory. "You must choose, wife—renounce all others, or watch me die for love."
She obviously wasn't familiar with the script: The Tragedy of the Faithless Wife, a classic farce-of-passion by the great Calloonic poet Ervard n' Ilthon, which I knew well because I had translated it as an exercise when I was studying Calloonic. I was glad she didn't know it, since the plot ended in a suicide pact after many misadventures, but the first confrontation between wronged husband and errant wife contained some nicely relevant lines. She was now supposed to throw herself at my feet weeping great waterfalls of remorseful tears. Instead, she threw her prayer-frame at my head.
I ducked. Under the circumstances, Ervard n' Ilthon's next line didn
't apply, so I improvised. "Rinn, my angel, I'd do anything for you!" The flagon came next—I ducked that too. "I'm the slave of my passion!" I added hastily, noting that she was now hefting the heavy silver flagon-tray in her hand. "Your slave," I amended.
She paused with the flagon-tray cocked above her head, that familiar calculating look returning to her eyes.
"My slave?" she said thoughtfully. She lowered the tray.
I could almost see the simple chain of consequences being forged in her mind: the Scion swears he is my slave, therefore I have achieved what the Frath Major asked me to do, therefore the Frath Major owes me. The tray clattered to the floor. Rather belatedly, she began to follow Ervard n' Ilthon's script.
* * *
19
ACCORDING TO SHREE, Zimin's hasty exit from Rinn's love-life coincided beautifully with the Frath Major's arrival in the salon, and most of our improvised enactment of The Faithless Wife was audible through the door. The Frath appeared sceptical at first—after all, this was a very sudden turnabout—but Shree humbly took him aside and told him in whispers, as instructed, about my hidden heart-burnings of the last few days, my growing obsession with Rinn's sensual charms, my sudden uncontrollable explosion of passion and jealousy. When Shree lies, he tends to overdo it, but this tripe fitted in so well with what the Frath wanted to hear that Shree could have been a much more florid liar and still have been convincing. By the time Rinn and I emerged from the cabin two hours later, myself staggering with exhaustion, the princess hanging triumphantly on my arm, the Frath was well on the way to believing in my conversion to the cult of Rinn-worship.
We went up on deck, lover-like, to watch the sunset. From a discreet distance, the Frath Major watched us with a smug look on his face. Shree and Chasco sat a little apart from him, also looking smug, but for different reasons. As for me, I was starting to realize one of the drawbacks of my brilliant strategy—from now on, I would have to pass a large proportion of my time with the Princess Rinn, not all of which could be spent in bed.
We strolled hand-in-hand in the fading dusk as the stars emerged one by one and the moon slowly undertook to paint the sea with silver. It was a perfect night for lovers—the wind had dropped to a gentle breeze, the water was lapping musically against the hull, somewhere on the forepart of the ship someone was plinking a sweet, melancholy tune on a wooden thumb-harp. Now and then a firestar flashed across the heavens.
None of this stage-dressing helped me as much as one might expect. I could not, to save my life, think of anything romantic to say, although Rinn rapidly made it clear what she wanted to hear. It seemed this did not include speculations on the crystalline nature of the stellar sphere, nor on the mysterious aethers which might fill the hollow globe of the universe; she was not interested in the constellations, nor in the messenger-stars that roamed more freely among their fixed brethren, nor in the Zelfic protocol for predicting eclipses of the moon. The stars were there purely as a counterpoint to her own magnificence. My brief was to assure her that she outshone them all.
I tried. Unlike Shree, I'm a woeful liar. My imagination will sometimes freeze under pressure. I could sense Rinn's mounting impatience as I struggled to think up passionate avowals and lush, steamy tributes to her charms, coming up instead with what sounded like lectures on female anatomy. At last I abandoned my own words and fell back gratefully into the arms of erotic literature, after which Rinn seemed satisfied and I felt even more like a fool and a charlatan. Bit by bit I worked my way through all I could remember of the Gillish Odes to Love, the Seduction of Cul the Golden, the Passionale and the Maiden's Silken Purse, and was just starting on the Erotic Mistifalia when Rinn turned her glorious face to mine and hushed me with a slender finger on my lips.
"Shut up for a moment, Scion," she said. "What is that red light over there?"
I looked where she indicated. A spot on the horizon was glowing, faintly and diffusely, as I remembered seeing Sathelforn glow in the distance on a clear night, from a hill in Exile; but this glow was red and fitful, and after a few minutes a bright hard ruby of light slid above the edge of the sea, the glow forming a soft halo around it. The lookout's cry, "Landsight!," broke the evening quiet.
There was a footfall behind us. "Landsight—that would be Vassashinay," said the Frath Major. His voice was relieved.
Rinn lost interest immediately. She twined herself around me and looked up into my eyes. "Tell me more," she purred, "about how much you worship me. Tell me how you will do anything to make me happy." This was probably to impress the Frath Major; the unspoken message was See, cousin, how well I've got him in the bag.
"You have enslaved my soul," I said dutifully, "I would do anything to make you happy. You are the sun in my heaven, the moon that shines in my heart, the stars that whisper to me in the night. If you asked me to, I would tear out my liver with my own hands and give it to you in a golden box." As if she'd have a use for it. And so on and so forth in the same sludgy vein, praying that Shree couldn't hear any of this twaddle, or I'd never live it down.
Meanwhile, over Rinn's head, I watched the burning red eye of Vassashinay as the wind pushed us slowly towards it through the sultry southern night. The Lady stirred now and then—but whether it was due to the sentimental garbage I was talking, or to the fact that we were approaching Vassashinay, she gave me no hint.
Distances can be deceptive at night. The red beacon of Vassashinay looked close enough to spit at, but it stubbornly appeared to remain at that distance for a very long time. The wind had dropped so that it barely filled our sails, which meant the Tasiil was only creeping along, but that could not completely account for it. Gradually, however, that small clear-cut gem of light suspended in the sky was seen to be balanced on the apex of a looming dark triangle, silhouetted against the dense field of stars; and then a rumble, like thunder, came to us across the water and bright arcs of fire launched themselves from the centre of the glowing jewel. What I had thought was a beacon or a light-tower was a reasonably lively volcano. Never having seen an active one before, I was fascinated.
Rinn was not.
I wanted to stay and watch, but she dragged me below for food and wine and more plagiarism and another practical demonstration of my humble worshipfulness, and my commitment to my own damned strategy made me helpless to refuse. And so it was that I missed the final approach to Vassashinay and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion throughout our arrival and the moonlit dropping of anchors in the peaceful harbour of Vass, and the ensuing frenzy of activity on the upper decks; and I also missed any words the Lady might have whispered about the fate, and something else, that was lying in wait for me on those silent shores.
Contrary to expectation, Vassashinay was luxuriantly, rampantly beautiful. It was not one main island but four, three of them being low green hummocks huddled in the shelter of the majestic fourth, the volcano. The surrounding sea was dotted with little whalebacks of coral, some of which were large enough to have collected tiny beaches and scrubby vegetation and permanent populations of seabirds, crabs, turtles, even wild dogs. More corals grew among and around the main islands, in places forming causeways and coralfields that were high and dry at low tide and could be used to cross from one island to another if you were careful about timing.
The main town, Vass, was on the largest of the three low islands, to the west of the volcano. Its harbour was a broad lagoon demarcated by a natural breakwater of coral that had been banked up with chunks of shiny dark stone, which I later found to be volcanic basalt. That same mix, coral from the sea and rough-quarried rock from the flanks of the great cone, was a dominant theme in Vassashin architecture.
Not that much architecture was visible at first. When, that first morning, I woke at dawn and removed Rinn's hair from my mouth and her heavy little skull from my windpipe and padded quietly to the open porthole, all I could see was a fine curve of white sand being lapped by the wavelets on one edge and running up to a lush fringe of jungle on the other. Numerous canoes and f
ishing boats were pulled up on the beach, and a few more were moored to a well-built jetty thrusting far out into the lagoon. At the edge of the line of trees, small knots of people were gathering and looking out towards the Tasiil. I could just make out the pale ovals of their faces.
Some of the knots came together, and I could see that a kind of ceremonial procession was forming up. The sound of drums and whistles floated thinly across the lagoon. I heard the splashing of oars as well, and craning out of the porthole, I was able to see one of the Tasiil's smallboats moving smoothly across the water towards the jetty. The Frath Major was seated in the bow, along with a handful of lesser nobles and a surprisingly small number of troopers.
The smallboat reached one end of the jetty just as the procession reached the other. I had a wild, brief moment of hope that the Vassashin were going to fall on the Frath immediately and do something barbaric to him, but they waited patiently on the sand, banging their drums and tootling their whistles, while he and his retinue clambered out of the smallboat and proceeded along the jetty. When they reached the sand, the Miishelu were engulfed at once—but still there was no violence. I cursed quietly to myself.
A large roll of carpeting was carried through a gap in the treeline and spread out on the sand. The Frath Major was escorted to it by a tall man in a peculiar cone-shaped headdress, followed by the entire population of the beach, Miisheli and Vassashin. I was amazed that the Frath was so trusting.
Quietly, I gathered up my scattered clothes and escaped to the salon, where Chasco and Shree were waiting for me. Rinn didn't stir when I left, which was just as well, because I really felt I couldn't face worshipping her before breakfast. We took refuge in Shree's cabin, where Chasco and I shaved as usual, and Shree did not—he hadn't shaved the day before, either, and was already looking villainous—and then raided the galley for some breakfast to eat on deck.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 14